The Center for Arabic Studies Abroad, known by its acronym “CASA”, has long been recognized as one of the most desirable destinations for American students at the advanced level of Arabic language study. Based at the American University in Cairo, CASA has provided intensive training to students in formal and colloquial Arabic since the 1960s. As the popularity of Arabic increases in universities, CASA is becoming even better known to students and its fellowships more coveted to increasingly large and talented applicant pools. I completed the full-year program last May, having taken my G-3 year away from Harvard to do so. This has put me in the fortunate position of being able to report to the CMES community about CASA and to provide views on the program from a student’s perspective.

Each February, Arabic professors from a consortium of American universities select approximately thirty fellows to participate in the CASA intensive program that begins in early June and runs to the end of May in the following year. In addition to the full-year program, CASA offers a summer-only track that typically invites six fellows. Admission to the two programs is competitive, and fellows are selected primarily on the basis of their performance on a proficiency exam. CASA provides funding to the majority of its fellows for tuition, living, and travel. A handful of students receive funding from other sources such as Fulbright, FLAS, and NSEP.

In my view, CASA deserves its reputation as one of the world’s premier institutions for modern Arabic study. The principal reason for this is that by most students’ accounts, the instructors are almost uniformly superb. They have extensive teaching experience. Many have received M.A. degrees in Teaching Arabic as a Foreign Language (TAFL). As students, we encountered a wide variety of classroom exercises and homework tasks that, over the course of the year, dramatically improved our abilities in writing, reading, speaking, and listening to Modern Standard and Egyptian Colloquial Arabic.

The curriculum is rigorous. A typical day in the summer and fall semesters involved five hours in the classroom and over four hours of homework. The weekend offered little respite, as we were routinely assigned homework that included long compositions and entire Arabic novels. My teachers scoured my writing, listening, and speaking assignments for mistakes. Often, I found myself on an evening doing both that evening’s homework and re-doing homework from a previous day.

The spring term, arguably the best part of the program, is refreshingly different from the summer and fall terms. Rather than studying Arabic in normal Arabic classes, students take a mandatory writing course and three, subject-based electives. Examples of electives from last spring are Modern Egyptian Politics, Arabic Poetry, Medieval Manuscripts, Modern Literature, and Sufism. The seminars are taught like normal subject courses, that is, in Arabic with Arabic homework assignments and term papers. The teachers are usually professors from other Egyptian universities.

CASA of course has the natural advantage of being located in Cairo. It is not necessary for me to convince this audience of the advantages of learning a language in situ. It seemed to me that the program’s best students were those who took advantage of being in Cairo by making Egyptian friends, attending cultural events and movies, traveling, and finding conversation partners and tutors.

The students in my year displayed great commitment to learning Arabic. Some of those who came to Egypt in June being able to communicate, read, and write only in slow and rather broken Arabic left the program with near native fluency. For many, this level of progress and achievement was reflected by their high scores on the Foreign Service-style language exam administered by CASA.

Personally, I hold CASA in high esteem largely because of the extent of my own progress in the program. Arabic students in the second, third, and fourth years who have not spent more than a summer or two in the Arab world understand well the frustration of knowing Arabic, and yet not really knowing it. That was certainly my predicament before CASA. Today, I can easily hold a conversation on a wide range of topics and speak in both colloquial and formal Arabic. I can write research papers on a computer, I can understand TV programs, and I can read newspapers with ease. I also overcame a fear shared by many Arabic students that learning one colloquial dialect can preclude them from speaking with Arabs who know another dialect. In recent months, I have communicated well with Saudis, Lebanese, Iraqis, and yes… even Moroccans.

I think that it is important for members of the CMES community to recognize CASA for its merits at this particular time. The last four years have witnessed a rise in the number university students studying Arabic. Yet, as we know, the academic infrastructure for teaching Arabic is lacking, most particularly at the advanced levels.
With this background in mind, it is disappointing that CASA is the only Arabic program of its kind. When it comes to training university students, particularly graduate students, there are no other advanced Arabic programs in the Middle East that can rival CASA in both the quality of the instruction it offers and the funding it provides to its fellows. CASA also enjoys an unrivaled reputation in American academic and diplomatic circles.

In my opinion, attempts should be made to replicate the CASA model elsewhere or to expand CASA itself so that it can employ more teachers and admit more students. Neither of these two ideas is new. However, the obstacles to realizing such goals are formidable. On one hand, appropriate funding needs to be acquired on the American side (at a time when basic funding sources like Title VI are in jeopardy); while on the other hand, bureaucratic hurdles are high for building American-allied educational institutions in Middle Eastern countries. All of this is not to mention that CASA itself, as it operates today, needs more funding. Its excellent teachers are underpaid and its fellows receive less than one-third of the monthly stipend received by Fulbright, FLAS, and NSEP fellows in Egypt. For example, the ordinary CASA-funded fellow receives a monthly living stipend of $365, while the rare FLAS-funded fellow in CASA receives a monthly living stipend of $1400. The CASA stipend is better than no stipend at all, but it could be better.

Harvard students who have three or more years of Arabic and who are considering a career involving Arabic should consider applying to CASA. Dr. Granara at CMES is an alumnus and former director of the program. I would be happy to answer any questions by email (wood@fas.harvard.edu). Other CMES members who have recently attended CASA include Nathan Fonder, Ben Smith, Jonathan Smolin, Iliana Montauk, and Dominic Longo.

Leonard Wood is a fourth-year PhD student in History and Middle Eastern Studies, writing his dissertation on the formation of the modern Egyptian legal system during the period of British rule from 1880-1952.